


we're a crooked love in a straight line down

by defcontwo



Series: the new romantics [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Break-up sex, Brief reference to homophobic language, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-20 00:30:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3629919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/defcontwo/pseuds/defcontwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Are you at your mother’s?” </p><p>Kent makes a sound like he’s yawning into the phone. He never was a morning person. “Yeah, ‘course.”</p><p>Jack leans back into his seat, and just barely manages to hold in his sigh of relief. “Good, because I just got off the 490 and I don’t really know where to go from here.”</p><p>Or: Jack has some time to kill during winter break, so he does something kind of impulsive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're a crooked love in a straight line down

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Ngozi for the gift that is this comic and my Kent Parson Problem, and thanks to all my bros who held my hand along the way.

Winter break unfolds in a rush: one minute, Jack’s fielding chirps from his team about the now infamous butt-dial mistake and the next minute, it’s the last night of Hanukkah and then Christmas, and before he knows it, they’re getting ready to roll into the new year.

There’s been a strange weight to the holidays this year, and Maman keeps going out of her way to drag Jack into the festivities in a way that she doesn’t normally. They’re all a little too aware that this is Jack’s last winter break at home as a college student; one semester left and then everything’s going to change, and Jack can’t really blame his parents for hanging on for dear life, not when so much of what lies ahead remains uncertain.

Jack spends a lot of time thinking about what comes next, now, but for the first time, the “what comes next” doesn’t make his chest tighten with panic quite as much as it used. What comes next isn’t the problem right now, not really.

The past, though. That’s where the real demons lie. That’s the thing that he can’t get out of his head, the thing he can’t stop running from.

God, he’s so fucking tired of running from it.

Which is the only possible explanation Jack can offer himself for why he gets up at 4 AM on New Year’s Day, bright eyed and wide awake, and with a sudden, undeniable urge to get into his car and drive all the way down to upstate New York.

So, he scrawls a note and leaves it under the coffeemaker, where his mother will see it first thing, hops into his car and takes off.

 

.

Jack’s two hours outside of Rochester when it occurs to him that there’s no way Kent’s mother still lives in the same house that she did six years and however many million dollars in NHL salary ago. Jack almost pulls over to the side of the road, feeling foolish and short-sighted for having driven all this way on a sentimental whim, and it would be so easy to turn right around and head back for the Canadian border, but he’s made it this far.

He’s made it this far.

Jack keeps on driving, turning the radio on as he goes and it has to be some sort of sign when “Go Your Own Way” comes out loud and clear through the speakers, so he presses his foot to the gas, speeding up -- if he keeps on going at this rate, he’ll make good time and get in around noon.

He’s just passed the “Welcome to Rochester” sign by when his phone vibrates in his pocket, so Jack digs it out at a red light, gaping a little in disbelief as he swipes it open to read a text from a number that he knows by heart.

 

> _Can we talk?_

 

Talk about a Zimmermann-Parson no-look classic.

He pulls over to the side of the road the first chance he gets, taking a second to thumb back through the contact history. There’s a whole history of unspoken hurt right here in this phone, from the very first text Kent tried to send him after rehab to the timestamp of the last time Jack bothered to respond: two years, six months and twelve days ago, to be exact.

Jack winces, scrolling back down to the bottom, and then pressing call.

“Well, that was fast,” Kent says, his voice coming through gravelly and thick; he sounds hungover which probably, he is. It’s New Year’s Day, after all. Most people are.

Jack has a sudden hysterical thought that maybe Kent’s not even in New York right now in the first place. Maybe he decided to stay in Vegas for the holidays or maybe he went back after Christmas to party with his team for New Year’s, and then Jack really did drive all this way for nothing. He’d never live this down, if this was ever the sort of thing that he could tell his team about; the chirping would be legendary.

“Are you at your mother’s?”

Kent makes a sound like he’s yawning into the phone. He never was a morning person. “Yeah, ‘course.”

Jack leans back into his seat, and just barely manages to hold in his sigh of relief. “Good, because I just got off the 490 and I don’t really know where to go from here.”

“You….what?”

Jack drums out a steady beat, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. “What, you’re the only one allowed to show up unannounced?”

The words fall flat; it’s the kind of chirp that only works in a world where the EpiKegster had gone differently. Maybe there’s an alternate universe where their night ended could’ve ended with Kent’s arm slung around Jack’s shoulders and wide, easy smiles shared in a crowded room instead of in so many knives slid under Jack’s skin because the two of them, they still know each other a little too well -- they know all the right places to really make the cut worth it.

Kent lets out a breath, and it echoes loudly through the phone. “Zimms, what the hell?”

Jack sighs, suddenly exhausted. “Right. You’re right. I’m sorry, I’ll just -- ”

“Wait, just -- shut up the fuck up a second, Zimms, alright,” Kent interrupts, and Jack can’t help but wonder when they turned into this. When did every conversation start coming out fraught and hurt and always on the razor’s edge of turning into a fight? They used to be able to talk all day every day for seven days straight and never fucking tire of each other.

But, well. They used to do a lot of things they don’t do anymore.

“Where off the 490?” Kent says, at last.

“What?”

“I can’t give you directions if I don’t know where you are, Jack.”

Jack cranes his neck around so that he can read off the name of the cross-streets behind him, and then Kent rattles off an address twenty minutes away that Jack punches into the GPS, and then he’s on his way.

Neither of them bother saying goodbye before they hang up but then again, that’s pretty par for the course.

 

.

Kent opens the door to his mother’s house clutching a coffee mug half the size of his face to his chest, all while wearing a thin, low-riding pair of sweatpants emblazoned with the Aces logo and precious little else.

“Huh,” Kent says. “You’re really here.”

Jack rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Did that seem like the kind of thing I would lie about?”

“Guess not,” Kent says, pulling back from the doorway and making way for Jack to shuffle inside after he’s kicked his boots against the side of the porch a couple of times, shaking the snow off the soles.

“Where’s your mother?” Jack asks, eyeing the coat rack in the corner, wondering if he should bother taking his coat off, if he’ll stay long enough for it to matter. Jack goes for unbuttoning it in compromise.

“Ithaca,” Kent answers, leading Jack into the kitchen. It’s a nice place. The kitchen is bright and modern with a whole wall of windows that have all frosted over with ice and snow. The house isn’t as big as Jack expected it to be but then again, Kent’s mother probably picked it out and she’s never seemed like the type to go for over the top.

“She’s on a romantic getaway with her boyfriend. They’ll be back in a few days. You want some coffee?”

Jack fiddles self-consciously, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his coat. It’s weird, how they’re pretending that this is normal when it’s the furthest thing from. Small talk with Kent Parson, now there’s a thing he never saw coming.

“Yeah, uh. Coffee would be great, thanks. She has a boyfriend now? What’s he like?”

Kent shrugs noncommittally, but the barely contained sneer goes and betrays him anyways. “He’s alright, I guess.”

Kent pulls down the container of sugar, scooping two spoonfuls into Jack’s mug without asking and Jack wants to be annoyed about that, by the presumption of it because that right there, that’s what makes up easily eighty-five percent of their problems -- a stubborn refusal to see the past five years for what they are: time apart, time spent becoming different people than they were when they were young and too stupid in love to know any better.

Jack’s spent the better part of those past five years putting his time with Kent in a box and shoving a lid on top, not wanting to let anything escape because it felt like the best way to go forward, to just forget about it all and move on, but it was a shitty coping strategy, of course -- he couldn’t forget Kent if he tried, and boy, did he try.

Kent kicks out a chair at the table, jerking his chin in the direction of it. “You can sit down, you know. Maybe even take off your coat, stay a while.”

Jack shrugs his coat off, draping it over the back of the chair that Kent kicked out before dropping into it, and pulling the mug that Kent poured for him closer. “Happy now?”

Kent huffs. “Fucking ecstatic, Zimms.”

He grabs a hold of the chair across from Jack, flipping it around so that he can straddle it, setting his coffee mug on the table with a clatter so that he can fold his arms over the back, leaning his chin on the edge of it. It’s all a practiced motion, every move calculated because it always is with Kent. Jack knows that it was intentional, the way the movement made Kent’s sweatpants pull down, drawing the eye, because that’s the easy part, right there, the sure thing: attraction’s never exactly been one of their problems. They used to get a real kick out of trying to push each other’s buttons, especially when they were in public, around their teammates, when everything had to be pushed down and out of sight because the rumors were already bad enough.

Still, though -- there’s something wary and quiet about Kent, now, that’s at odds with the everything else.

“What’d you get up to last night?” Jack says, angling to start in on neutral territory.

“Some guys I used to hang with over the summer growing up invited me to their kegger last night. It was, you know….they were serving Natty Ice and said ‘faggot’ no less than twenty times an hour, so copping shots of fireball all night off a girl who brought a flask seemed like the path of least resistance,” Kent says, and there’s a hurt, bitter twist to his mouth that reminds Jack of Bitty whenever his father calls, and Jack finds that his next sip of coffee goes down thick and tasteless.

See, the thing is, Jack chose his silence and Kent -- Kent did too, in a way, and maybe it came with a six hundred thousand dollar contract, but it’s still not the same, not by a long shot.

“Don’t,” Kent says, voice sharp, cutting into Jack’s thoughts. “Don’t give me that look, Zimms, I don’t want or need your fucking pity.”

“I didn’t -- ”

“I said, don’t.”

The silence stretches between them, thick and uncomfortable, until finally, Kent breaks it: “I’m sorry about what happened at the EpiKegster.”

Jack leans back in his chair, taking a slow, measured sip of his coffee. He’s proud of himself, a little, for how calm he’s being right now. “Which part of it?”

Kent slumps forward, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes, and letting out a low, mirthless laugh. “I don’t know, all of it? For being a mean drunk and a sore fucking loser, mostly.”

Jack blinks, taken back. “What the hell do you have to be a sore loser about?”

Kent drops his hands to the table with a slap, leveling Jack with an incredulous stare. “Come on, Zimms, don’t play dumb, it doesn’t suit you. Cute little Southern boy, about yay high, who kept looking at you like he had literal fucking hearts in his eyes? Like _I_ don’t know what it looks like when you’re into someone.”

“That’s not -- Bitty and I aren’t -- it’s not like that, Parse,” Jack stammers out, still taken aback because talking about Bitty is the last thing he expected when he came all the way out here but now that it’s happening, he has to admit, that was probably pretty short-sighted of him. Of course they were always going to talk about Bitty -- there’s a little of Bitty in so much that Jack does, these days, in so many of the small ways that he’s found himself opening up over the past few months. _You play better when you’re with Bitty,_ the coaches said, but Jack’s starting to think that maybe he just does everything better with Bitty around.

“Is that a ‘no, it’s not like that at all’ or a ‘no, it’s not like that _yet_ ’?”

Jack swallows hard. He’s trying to make a point of being honest, and well, the truth is this: the cookies in his suitcase, the texts that he and Bitty have sent to each other all throughout break, the way Bitty looked up at him that night in the Haus before the whole thing went to hell -- all of it feels like a slow and steady climb to an inevitable end, and for the first time in a long time, Jack wants to take that risk and reach that inevitable end, for all that he’s enjoying the journey along the way.

He clears his throat. “It _is_ like that. Just not yet. And also, it’s none of your fucking business.”

Kent’s head jerks back like he’s been hit. It felt good to say, felt good to draw that line in the sand, felt good to say the words out loud, finally, to acknowledge this thing between him and Bitty as something real and tangible, and not just a maybe some-day that worries its way around his mind.

“Jesus,” Kent says, letting out a low, gusty sigh. “Listen to us, you’d think we were fucking married or something.”

It’s funny, how maybe that’s not entirely as far from the truth as it should be. There was a time, not that long ago, when their lives were so entangled that you didn’t hear of one without the other: Zimmermann-and-Parson, Parson-and-Zimmermann. Every plan they ever had, every move they ever made, began and ended with each other.

“I don’t know,” Jack says. “This kind of feels like a long, bitterly drawn out divorce to me.”

Kent drops his head forward onto the back of the chair, but his shoulders shake with laughter, and Jack can’t help himself, he laughs too, and he can finally feel some of the tension leak out of the room.

“Why are you here, Jack?”

And that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it, because Jack hopped in his car and drove all the way down here on a whim, mostly, because he can admit to himself that his impulse control has always been for shit when it comes to Kent V. Parson.

“Do you remember….do you remember when we first met, back before…...back before we started going to parties, before we started fooling around, when we spent all our spare time on that moldy, sinking couch in your billet family’s basement, playing FIFA 9?”

Kent raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, ‘course. It wasn’t _that_ long ago.”

“Do you ever miss those days?”

A smile tugs at the corner of Kent’s lips, small and genuine, and it’s a sight Jack hasn’t seen in years and years. “All the time, Zimms.”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “Me too.”

“You have to get with the times, though, old man. You know, they made six more games after that.”

Jack reaches out with his left foot to kick Kent in the shin. “I know _that_ , we have FIFA 15 at the Haus. I’m not that much of a technophobe.”

“So, how about it, Jack?” Kent says, pasting on that shit-eating, competitive grin that Aces’ competitors know and fear so well. “You and me, may the best man win? I’ve got dibs on Ibrahimović.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me,” Jack mutters to himself, but he’s in, of course.

 

.

Jack has spent a lot of time dealing in what-ifs.

What if he hadn’t overdosed? What if he’d gone first in the draft? What if he’d spent the past five years in the NHL? Would he have a Stanley Cup under his belt by now or would he have lost it all anyways?

What if he’d never kissed Kent that first time, a whole lifetime away in that basement, when playing FIFA 9 had turned into fighting over playing FIFA 9 had turned into wrestling on the floor, with Jack’s arms pinned to the carpet above his head -- when the weight of his best friend, too close and too much to ignore, had felt more like a lifeline than a reason to drown. Would things have gotten this fucked up between them if they’d never crossed that line? Or would they still be friends, as easy as anything, having long since pushed past and moved beyond whatever sexual tension lay between them?

It’s a pointless what-if, though.

There’s no alternate universe, no what-if timeline where Jack doesn’t kiss Kent in that basement, or in the supply closet at the rink, later, or in any of the innumerable other places that they found themselves fooling around in.

Maybe there’s a different what-if, a world where they never fell apart, a world where they made it work, anyways, but there’s no fucking point thinking about that one, either.

So this is here, and now:

They play FIFA 15. Jack wins, and then Kent wins, and Kent is equally insufferable about both of these things, all loud-mouthed taunts and drawling self-satisfaction, so Jack whacks him with the controller. Kent lets out a yelp that Jack can’t help but chirp him for, and then they’re off, poking and prodding and teasing, and it’s not a surprise, really, when Jack finds himself with his arms pinned to the couch, and Kent’s knees straddling his waist.

Kent releases Jack’s arms, leaning back on his haunches, but his right hand falls to rest at the space where Jack’s t-shirt has ridden up, revealing pale skin, and Jack shivers at the contact. Three weeks ago, at the EpiKegster, proximity to Kent had felt like too much, too overwhelming, like there was too much carnage laid between them to ever get through. This...doesn’t, strangely, and for once, Jack doesn’t want to spend too much time over analyzing it.

“You know,” Kent starts, conversationally. “Sometimes, when newly divorced couples meet up to sign the papers together, they fuck, you know, like one last time for old time’s sake and all that.”

Jack laughs, incredulous. “You made that up.”

“Shut the fuck up, I did not. Happens all the time in soaps,” Kent says, entirely with a straight face.

Jack hums. This probably isn’t what his therapist meant by “getting closure” but there’s something compelling in the idea of it, in ending exactly as they began, like maybe they’ve come full circle and can break free of this cycle, can start over as something new, or maybe, more honestly, maybe Jack just really wants to fuck Kent one last time, and that’s okay too. Honesty; he’s working on it.

Jack sits up, so that they’re almost chest-to-chest, with Kent draped haphazardly over his lap. “Whatever you say, Kenny,” he says, and kisses him.

 

.

Jack wakes up to the sound of a shower running, with his face buried into a pillow. It’s early yet, he can tell; the morning light streaming through the blinds in Kent’s room is dim, still, and there’s that soft, warm something that hangs in the air in the dawn hours, like there’s nothing else in the world that matters except for the weight of the comforter draped over his back.

The shower turns off, and Kent walks in a minute later, wet hair clinging to his forehead and a towel wrapped around his waist.

Jack rolls over onto his back, propping the pillow up behind his head. “Little early for a shower, eh?”

“Dude, I didn’t shower at all yesterday after I woke up hungover, and I definitely still smelled like the fireball that chick kept spilling all over the place. I can’t believe you had sex with me,” Kent says, digging through his closet for clothes.

“Guess I’ve just always had low standards,” Jack says, laughing when Kent turns around and throws the towel at him, but Jack catches it before it can hit him in the face.

Kent turns back to the closet, and flips Jack off without looking. “Yeah, fuck you too, Zimms.”

Jack’s phone buzzes from where he left it abandoned on Kent’s bedside table, and he reaches for it, swiping it open. There’s a whole series of unread texts from the Samwell Hockey Group Chat, and just one message from his mother that reads: “Everything okay, sweetheart?”

 _All good. Driving back home today_ , Jack types out, before dropping his phone back onto the table. “I should head out soon. Last winter break before I graduate, my parents are trying to cram in as much family bonding as they can.”

Kent, now dressed, leans back against his closet doors, and pushes a hand through his unruly hair. “Honeymoon’s over, huh?”

“Now you’re just fucking up the metaphor, Kenny,” Jack says, throwing the towel back, only Kent doesn’t catch it in time, and it smacks him in the chest.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kent says, tossing the towel into the laundry basket, and making for the door. “Nag, nag, nag. This is why we’re not married; you’re too fucking nitpicky.”

“That, and you’re an asshole.”

“Takes one to know one,” Kent calls over his shoulder. “You want breakfast, or are you going to sneak out my bedroom window when I’m not looking?”

Jack pulls his knees up to his chest, turning his head to hide a smile into the crook of his arm, for all that Kent’s not even there to see it. “Breakfast sounds good.”

 

.

Jack’s halfway through packing for his last semester when he gets the message. He ignores it, at first, assuming it’s just another update to the group chat, but then he reaches for his phone out of curiosity a minute later because he’s bored of folding sweaters.

Instead of the usual wall of texts that dictates a Samwell Hockey Group Chat update, there’s just a single text, from Kent: _Good luck with the rest of your season, Zimms._

 _Thanks, you too,_ Jack texts back. Two minutes later, he gets back a series of mostly incomprehensible emojis, but there’s a thumbs up or two thrown in there, so he guesses that’s a good thing.

 _Use English, you weirdo,_ he sends back, but he only gets a single   in return because Kent will probably always take the opportunity to be an asshole when it’s presented to him, but Jack laughs, anyways.

They’re gonna be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> Life advice by Kent Parson: love yourself as much as Ibrahimović loves Ibrahimović.
> 
> We don't know that much about Kent's home-life outside of the fact that he's from upstate New York, so Rochester was just a wild guess on my part.


End file.
